One tragic quote sums up how the police killing of a Louisiana man is part of a much bigger problem

At a news conference on Wednesday, Quinyetta McMillon, the mother
of the oldest child of Alton Sterling, the 37-year-old black man
fatally shot during a confrontation with two white officers in
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Tuesday, addressed the public for the
first time since the shooting.

"The individuals involved in
his murder took away a man with children who depended upon their
daddy on a daily basis,"
McMillon said. "As a mother I have now been forced to raise a
son who is going to remember what happened to his father."

McMillon's tragic quote is emblematic of structural
racism, a system in which a handful of policies and
practices at the institutional level drive home the idea that one
racial group is less deserving, less hardworking, or inferior to
another.

"A system in which public policies, institutional practices,
cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often
reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. It
identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have
allowed privileges associated with 'whiteness' and disadvantages
associated with 'color' to endure and adapt over time. Structural
racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose
to practice. Instead it has been a feature of the social,
economic and political systems in which we all exist."

In this case, Cameron Sterling now grows up without a father,
because of an incident involving the state, which perpetuates
social and economic disadvantages related to his race, as well as
coloring his view and interactions with the police and the
government for the rest of his life.

Such a statement might have less weight if the shooting of
Sterling were an isolated incident or something that affected all
Americans equally. But the data shows that to be far from true.

Data from The Counted, a project by The Guardian to
document people killed by the police in the US in 2015 and 2016,
"paints
a dramatic portrait ... the US is not just some outlier in
terms of police violence when compared with countries of similar
economic and political standing," Guardian reporter Jamiles
Lartey wrote. Rather, the US is "the outlier," Lartey
said.

While The Counted focused on many aspects of police
killings in the US, its data showed the phenomenon to be
disproportionately affecting black people in particular.

"This epidemic is disproportionately affecting black people,"
Brittany Packnett, an activist who is a member of the White House
task force on policing,
told The Guardian. "We are wasting so many promising young
lives by continuing to allow this to happen."